Chin Music Press - Adventures in Publishing - 'Poppas' called 'almost musical' in NCR review

'Poppas' called 'almost musical' in NCR review

We're on a roll this week. The National Cathloc Reporter is running an excellent review of Last of the Red Hot Poppas in its June 8 edition. Since the online version charges people who don't subscribe to the paper, here's a passage from the review that gives you a sense of the insightful approach of reviewer Tom Roberts:

One of the unintended benefits of Last of the Red Hot Poppas is the deep immersion one gets into pre-Katrina Louisiana, an experience of a kind of “Louisiana whole,” before everything began coming apart.

There is, to this outsider’s ear, a kind of slide and slur in the Louisiana dialect that betrays an oblique way of coming at things. No Northeastern high-energy, righteous confrontation here, no flat Midwestern punctiliousness. One gets the sense that the charm and timbre of an attack in Rex LaSalle’s kingdom are as important as the battle itself.

In that sense, the novel at times is almost musical. “Ask the satin who stained the sheets, Mister Chris. I know plenty women Rex harpooned, but they liked him. It just takes one too many. What you gonna do: Round up every chickywawa in Looziana and have a lineup? Pooh. ACLU be chuckin’ spears and the police chief have a scandal. Nobody knows who packed Rex.”

In a broad sense — more in the manner of art than slapstick — this is a political/religious comedy about a powerful politician and the people around him. In the end everyone, in some way or other, winds up talking to God and wondering why and how they’ve wound up in an ever more complicated cover-up of a murder.

Bruce Rutledge >> June 06, 2007

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